Step Three: SMART Goals

Step Three--SMART Goals

How do you make changes happen? All the wishing in the world doesn't do it. Haphazardly struggling through every day second guessing everything you do doesn't either. In order for a goal to become reality, it requires a few special features to make it a SMART goal. You probably have heard of this acronym: 

Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time-Based Goals=SMART Goals.
Learn more at https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/smart-goals.htm

You want to lose weight? An example SMART goal would be something like the following.
          I want to reduce my weight to X, and these are the steps that I will take:
               1) Track my food intake daily
               2) Record my weight and water intake daily
               3) Stop eating anything with added sugar, etc.

In order to make it realistic, it helps to read the stories of others. I hope my story helps others feel like they can do this. I cannot say it has always been easy, but it is something that is worth the doing!

A time-based goal would be made by determining how much weight you can expect to lose on average per week and plotting a chart to see how many weeks it should take. Most people lose more weight at first when they begin a diet. So this may be adjusted over time. Actually any part of the Change Your Life Diet can be adjusted as needed. 

I tweaked my diet (sort of bio-hacking) as I went along until it worked for me. And of course, exercise is incorporated in a progressive fashion, because you have to start somewhere, and you won't get anywhere fast unless you add to your routine as your fitness level increases.

Next time, I will talk about BIG BAD SUGAR. Until then, keep drinking water, tracking your food and weight, and start trying to formulate a SMART Goal or two that you can adapt as you go on. 

20th Post

I made a goal to blog 5 times in June, at a minimum. I am planning to diversify my blogging soon, to include several blogs that cover more specific topics, since specific randomosity is indeed vague...

Some of the ideas I have for blogs that I would be interested in writing, and I feel others would be interested in reading, are as follows:

• Book/Reading
• Movie
• Health
• Parenting
• Gardening
• Lifelong learning
• Cooking
• Motivational/personal development
• Business/success
• Gaming
• Maybe others, just listing these off the top of my head...

Also, I am thinking about coming up with some kind of combination ideas that will cover multiple areas in a synchronized fashion. I don't mean that I must blog about all of these topics, just that they are potential areas I can cover. Well since this is the 20th post in my randomness-focused blog, here is a picture of my dog, for fun.

What to Do When You Have Too Much to Do

Feeling overwhelmed? Yeah, me too. For every task I complete there are always 20 more waiting for me to do. Sometimes I write a list of things to do, and cross them off, which is mildly satisfying, when I complete them. But then the next day, I have more to add, and I get less proportionately done, because of the leftovers from the day before...!
How to solve this dilemma? Let's start by following Brian Tracy's advice, from Eat That Frog!:

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

Eat That Frog!  Every bit of planning, prioritizing, and organizing comes down to this simple concept.

Every great achievement of humankind has been preceded by a long period of hard, concentrated work until the job was done.  Your ability to select your most important task, to begin it, and then to concentrate on it until it is complete is the key to high levels of performance and personal productivity.

By concentrating on your most important task, you can reduce the time required to complete it by 50% or more.

It has been estimated that the tendency to start and stop a task – to pick it up, put it down, and come back to it – can increase the time necessary to complete the task by as much as 500%.  This is not productive!

But when you prepare thoroughly and then begin, refusing to stop or turn aside until the job is done, you develop energy, enthusiasm, and motivation.  You get better and better and more productive.  You work faster and more effectively.

Another great source of advice is James Clear. In one of his recent blogs, he outlined the principle of the Two Minute Rule. The basic tenets of this rule are: if you can do it in 2 minutes or less, get it done now, and anything else, get started now, because 2 minutes is enough to get past your inertia and leads, quite often to getting the task done or at least a substantial start.

Well, it sure beats sitting around and sighing about how much you have to do!

Until next time!